


hooters

by dhabitude



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bars and Pubs, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Harry has bad coping mechanisms, No Plot, and drinks a bit too much on thursdays, but i dont outwardly say so, but its not graphic, but the american food place, he bought a pub and a house, he doesn't own a lawnmower, i capitalize a lot of words, idk why he visits narcissa i just liked it i suppose, mentions of death and decomposing corpses, the grass is a parallel to his hair when petunia cuts it, the title is a reference to not only an owl, worried friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:41:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26322829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dhabitude/pseuds/dhabitude
Summary: Lily and James have been dead for a good eighteen years, so why is Harry sad about it now?or; Harry buys a house
Relationships: Hermione Granger & Harry Potter & Ron Weasley
Kudos: 5





	hooters

The first thing Harry had done was cut the grass. 

It towered up to his waist and curled around the rubble of his parents' home, bright green in the summer sun.

"I still think you shouldn't be doing this." Hermione had said when he got a tic. She refused to go past the gate, arms crossed and mouth pursed. "It doesn’t seem right."

Harry had rolled his eyes and grinned at her, tilted his head to one side and watched as her expression softened. "It's grass Hermione. Its not as if Voldermort's gonna pop out of it."

"Harry." Her tone was soft and firm and she gave him The Look, the one with the big worried eyes and the furrowed brows and Harry rolled his eyes. "I'm worried about you."

Because that was the thing; moving into the house where your parents had been murdered and your life had gone kaput was a bit of an odd thing to do. The entire wizarding world thought so, after Harry had spent two gruelling months after the war fighting with heritage societies to get his house back. Rita Skeeter had made sure she was on the front page every day, in his best dressed in courts testifying for and against people and, once, in his undies after being chucked out of someone's house. Ron had put it up on the fridge, embellishing the newspaper with bad drawings of love hearts and flowers.

"When I'm on my deathbed, mate, I don’t want you there." Ron had grinned at him, holding the paper to his chest and swaying. "All I want is the scoundrel who broke some young lasses' heart, framed and put on my chest." And Harry had rolled his eyes and smiled and had a cup of tea, thumping Ron over the head.

"Honestly," Hermione said now and Harry had to squint at her, sun in his eyes, "Molly wants you over for Sunday tea, Harry, this is not the time to be doing this."

And that's the other thing; Harry hadn't spoken to Ginny since Fred's funeral, where he had held her by his grave and then was whisked away by a group of aurors to yet another bloody trial. He was more than content to stay in the grass outside his parents' house cleaning up, back sweaty and face dirty. It was late July and his birthday was next week and the sun was beating down on his back, warming him up. Daisies and dandelions were beneath his feet and he felt rather much like staying where he was. 

"I'll come round, Mione, promise." Harry smiled at her, a small one and Hermione frowned at him. 

She was wearing a navy pantsuit that fitted a bit weird round the shoulders. Harry recognised it from when Ginny had worn it to court, locking the Carrows up for life. Hermione had taken to slicking her hair back into a tight bun at the nape of her neck but it still always fuzzed out by the end of the day. Harry was almost a hundred percent sure that second year Hermione would think that nineteen year old Hermione was perhaps the coolest person ever.

"You better." And then Hermione wagged her finger at Harry, looking so startlingly like Madam Pince that Harry gulped. Hermione was scary at the best of times, but Harry felt happier when she was in her flannel pyjamas drinking hot chocolate. 

Harry nodded, and Hermione apparated away with a loud crack. The war had changed her a lot, but it always unsettled Harry when she didn’t look around for muggles before doing magic. He always wanted to reprimand her, but was sure that Ron would never shut up about it if he did. 

The grass was long and Harry went about picking up bits of brick and stone. They all felt rather heavy in hands as he put them just inside the porch, looking out of place and making Harry's stomach ache. He hadn't been inside yet, not past the coat rack, because it still had coats on it and Harry didn't know how long it took a dead body to decompose. He didn’t want to ask Hermione, who would probably give him another Look, and he didn’t want to go about asking whether they were indeed in their graves down the road. He supposed he was scared of them not being in the house, because then he'd have no excuse but to clean the house up and move on. Even without all the trauma he'd experienced in this house, he was also a bit of a slob.

And so the rubble went into the porch - to be repaired or to be thrown away, Harry wasn’t sure- and the sun began to set. Summer nights were the closest Harry got to feeling like he was dead again, although he would never say that out loud. But when the sun began to dip over the hills on the horizon and the air went clearer everything felt like it was in a limbo. Owls started to hoot early and Harry could hear the shouts from the pub down the road but everything was peaceful. 

Nights during his seventh year weren't like this, and he thought about that a lot. How just a few months ago he was camping out in forests and the air got cold too fast and the trees started to creak too loudly in the wind much too quickly. Harry went on walks in the woods surrounding Godric's Hollow quite a bit, following the paths put down by the council; blue, green and yellow. Hard, medium, easy. People were easy to come across in these woods, walking their dogs or riding bikes, and Harry would nod and smile at them. It was nice and felt rather homey, moving out the way of a biker or standing on top of a toad carved from a fallen tree and feeling the wind on his face.

The sun set and Harry moved rubble into the porch and cut the hedges down with a pair of rusty shears Mr Weasley had given him. The sky got dark quickly and Harry put the shears away and shut the front door and waded through grass that was curling around his waist. He didn’t go to the Burrow, found it difficult to sit through the forced cheerfulness the Weasleys all had, because he knew Ron woke up from angry nightmares every night crying and would bet all his money that George and Ginny did too.

The walls in Grimmauld Place were thin and everything was dusty and Harry hated it there. Kreacher had put up a right old fuss when Harry stopped coming home, and had shown up every night at the pub down the road from Harry's dead parents' house. He brought with him food that Harry didn’t like and rhubarb crumble because it gave Harry the shits, but he wore Regulus' locket and cast warming charms in the room Harry was lodging in because Harry couldn’t sleep without the window open and it was bloody cold at night.

And he slept, horrible, horrible dreams. They were never about Voldemort, always his mum and dad and him as a baby. "Repressed memories," Hermione had said and gave him The Look, the one that meant she was terribly worried and would Harry please stop being a bit of a hermit because we miss him. 

In his dreams his Dead Mum and his Dead Dad and sometimes, his Dead Godfather and his Dead Remus, would look at him and coo and laugh with each other and teach him how to ride a baby broom. They were never like the resurrected them, and Harry would wake up warm and sweaty and think about the Tale of the Three Brothers and the second brother, humming as he made a cup of tea with the cheap kettle on the draws by his bed.

The only deviation from his days cutting grass that grew tall again overnight was on Thursdays, when he would visit Narcissa Malfoy and eat toad in the hole that she wouldn’t deign to touch. They would talk about the Manor and Harry's dead parents' house and the weather and just how lovely the food was, in a villa somewhere in Italy, where she was on house arrest and where he would drink a bit too much wine and leave some of his hair at her house when he would apparate back to England drunk. 

Aurors would be waiting at his dead parents' house when he eventually came home, wondering just why he was apparating overseas without a permit. 

"Visiting Malfoy." Harry always grinned at them, drunk, and they would never believe him, not truly, these uptight Auror Jenkins and Auror Smith, with their frowns and big disapproving eyebrows. They always shared a Look, one with furrowed eyebrows and set jaws and pursed lips because who did Harry Potter think he was? Honestly. 

Auror Jenkins and Auror Smith would tell him off, not like how Professor McGonagall used to because he was now the Saviour of the Wizarding World, and you don’t arrest him, even if he an annoying slob. He'd had his apparation license evoked three times now, though, and rather hated the floo trip to Italy, where Narcissa Malfoy would be waiting. 

Harry didn’t cut the grass on Thursdays because Hermione and Ron would be waiting for him at the pub down the street from his dead parents' house -because it wasn’t his, not truly, it wouldn’t even let him cut the bloody grass- and Hermione would give him The Look and Ron would clap him on the shoulder and get him a pint. Act like he wasn’t shitfaced and missing an eyebrow or his hair or, once, all his eyelashes and like they were normal mates drinking pints in a pub. Like Ron's brother wasn’t dead and like Harry hadn't stopped answering all his floos and hadn't bought a bloody pub and a bloody house that he was too scared to go in and what would it be next, the graveyard his parents were in? Hermione would ask him questions about the house and the pub and Harry would shrug and talk about grass and open windows.

"We miss you mate." Ron would hug him as he left, tight and constricting, and would thump him on the back hard and Harry would hum. 

"We'll see you at the Burrow on Sunday, won't we Harry?" Hermione would say, sort of desperately, and Harry would hum and hug her.

And he'd walk up the stairs to where Kreacher waited for him, who started to give him food he liked after the first couple months. And Harry would cut the grass in his dead parents' house everyday, and wonder whether it was the house not liking him or him not liking the house or, perhaps, him liking the grass long because it gave him something to do. Because he didn’t want to go into the house, even if Narcissa was ever so sure his Dead Mum and Dead Dad were dead in coffins and not sprawled across the floor.

**Author's Note:**

> this was supposed to be a lot longer than it was and i think you can see the descent into me deciding that it another one chapter fic around when i mention kreacher for the first time


End file.
